B. H. Fairchild: Orpheus of the Midwest

When B.H. Fairchild won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest in 2002, the award resonated for the devotees of his lyrical, narrative, and richly-layered poetry as the premier accolade of Fairchild’s three-year accumulation of over a dozen national honors and awards. In a sense, the award was both anticipated and unexpected. Born in 1946, Fairchild only recently came into national prominence as a poet with the publication of his previous collection, The Art of the Lathe, in 1998. He was raised in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and at the core of Fairchild’s artistic vision is the unconventional poetic pedigree of laboring in his father’s machine shop with, as he says in the poem "Beauty" from The Art of the Lathe, "men/ who knew the true meaning of labor and money and other/ hard, true things and did not, did not ever, use the word, beauty." The poems in Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest expand on the themes of isolation, memory, work, and desire explored in The Art of the Lathe; they are as evocative as they are unconventional.

In one of the book’s early poems, "Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt," the poem’s speaker interweaves his father playing catch with Moses Yellowhorse—a Native American pitcher who “in a feat of almost angelic beauty/… struck out Gehrig, Ruth and Lazzeri/ with nine straight heaters”—with Moses Yellowhorse’s ultimate disenchantment with baseball, the mythology of the American dream, and the speaker’s own sense of individual failure. In the concluding lines of the poem, Fairchild writes, “it occurs to me/ that… baseball is/ a question of neither beauty nor politics/ but rather mythology, the collective dream,/ the old dream of men becoming gods/ or at the very least, as they remove/ their wings, being recognized as men.” It is a poem that embodies the theme of the “collective dream” that permeates the book, as characters locked in their geographies of work, family, place, and limited opportunity find transcendence or ruination in the collective mythologies of their lives.

Such is the case, too, in “Rave On,” where a group of adolescent boys scrape together money to rebuild junked cars and then, at a speed of sixty miles per hour, roll the cars intentionally on a dirt road. Fairchild writes that the adolescent desperation in the act was not only transitional, but transformational: “when you flipped the wheel clockwise you were there/ rolling in the belly of the whale, belly of hell,/ and your soul fainteth within you for we had seen it done/ by Big Ed Ravenscroft who said you would go in a boy/ and come out a man….”

There is much humor in the book, as well. Consider the opening lines of “Brazil”: “This is for Elton Wayne Showalter, redneck surrealist/ who, drunk, one Friday night tried to hold up the local 7-Eleven/ with a caulking gun, and who, when Melinda Bozell boasted/ that she would never let a boy touch her ‘down there,’ said,/ ‘Down there? You mean, like, Brazil?’”
The greatness of Fairchild’s poetry resides in his ability to unflinchingly investigate the human capacity for memory, imagination, suffering, compassion, and desire, what he defines in “Blood Rain” as “The heart’s dream/ of art’s divinity as death rolls down the street.”

--Jonathan Fink, Assistant Professor of English